School budget votes at issue Lawmakers weigh exemption from referendums for some

AUGUSTA – Proposed legislation dealing with the budgetary process for consolidated regional school units received a mixed reception at public hearings Tuesday.

One of the proposals before the Legislature’s Education and Cultural Affairs Committee dealt with the mandated budget referendum for consolidated school districts that must be in place by July 2009. A second proposal would establish exemptions to the public referendum process for some school systems.

Committee Chairman Sen. Peter Bowman, D-Kittery, reminded those testifying at the hearing that the committee would conduct work sessions on the proposals before deciding whether they should be submitted as bills to the full Legislature. The work sessions are expected to be completed within the next few weeks.

Bowman said the proposals were compiled from the more than 65 bills submitted by various legislators looking to revise the state’s new school consolidation law. They were drafted after hearings with the legislators involved and after straw votes were conducted among committee members, Bowman said.

Bowman described the bill dealing with the budget referendum as “simple” and the one allowing exemptions from voting on the budget as “more complex, more controversial.”

Geoff Herman of the Maine Municipal Association testified in support of the bill dealing with the budget referendum. He said the proposal corrected some of the problems the original law overlooked, especially the election requirements that towns and cities were finding difficult to implement.

The proposal requires every regional school unit, or district, to conduct a referendum within 10 days of the budget being approved by regional school committee. If the budget is rejected by the voters, it must be resubmitted until it passes. Herman noted that waiting for a new budget to be approved would create problems for tax assessors and urged the committee to correct that section.

“It’s tough for a municipality to commit its taxes if it doesn’t have a school budget,” Herman said. “It does not get to the core issue of how the municipality commits its taxes.”

Herman also recommended that the committee consider giving communities more time to consolidate. He said the proposals establish additional deadlines that make it even harder to put together a working system.

“The whole process has been delayed already,” he said. The proposal “doesn’t provide for the extraordinary slowdown in the process.”

Stephen Bowen, education policy director for the Maine Heritage Policy Center of Portland, testified in support of the budget referendum. He noted that three school districts in Maine already have adopted similar procedures and their communities have supported the method repeatedly.

Bowen described the provision that requires school units to ask voters whether they approve or disapprove of the budget process every three years as a key to its success. He said that in all three districts the voters supported the process by better than 3-to-1.

“Furthermore, we found that the process was highly successful in containing rising costs,” Bowen said. “School budgets not only grew slower once the process was put in place, they grew at a rate well below the state average.”

Bowen added that had the same budget process been in place statewide during the 2005-06 school year, taxpayers would have saved about $40 million on school budgets that year.

Bowen testified that he had “grave concerns” about the second proposal, which would exempt schools in the state’s large cities with standalone school systems, as well as certain other school units, from having to conduct a referendum if their budgets increase by only 5 percent above the state’s Essential Programs and Services subsidy formula in any given year.

“How can it be that people in those districts should not get the opportunity to step into a ballot box and express their views on these budgets?” he asked. “I think the principle has to be that everybody gets to vote on school budgets.”